Other Edens, page 3
“He doesn’t mean to be cold to you,” I said. “It’s just that —”
“I’m a bastard,” Joshua said. “I wish you’d stop lying to me about the special circumstances of my birth, about angels and portents and wise men’s gifts —”
“But one wise man came back,” I said. “And you were the one who called him an angel.”
“Joseph says he’s a messenger from the dark goddess whom women worship in secret.”
“But he agreed to come on this journey.”
“Because he doesn’t want to know that he’s afraid. But I do know. He’s an open book. More open to me than his Torah, anyway.”
And though he was the one who invited me to walk with him, he sped up and moved away from the encampment, in the direction of the desert. In the distance, there were dunes, stark in the moonlight, slowly shifting, sifting in the chill wind.
I caught up with him. “Joshua —” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. But he brushed me away.
“Maybe if I stand out here long enough,” he whispered, “my father will come and talk to me.”
“Joseph’s asleep,” I said.
“Yes,” Joshua said, “he is.” And he turned from me, and walked further into the expanse of sand, his gaze fixed on the moon.
“You’ll catch cold,” I said, but I knew he wasn’t listening anymore.
* * *
The tree in my atrium in Ephesus has ten branches. I’ve kept it very carefully pruned, so the branches are evenly spaced and the foliage has room to spread out. It’s the only thing that lives in that atrium garden; everything else I’ve planted always dies, so I’ve taken to letting the stonemasons dump their failed statues here; there’s a few Cupids, one of Jupiter, and many abortive Dianas of Ephesus, with her many breasts, she is tough to get right.
Sometimes one of the Christianoi will come and see me; Paul’s propaganda war to make my son into God seems to be working; I’ve heard them whisper to each other, “Look, look, God’s mother.” And they tell me the tree symbolizes the crucifixion, and they exclaim, “Lo! the tree flourishes, and all around it the statues of the ancient gods have been smashed; our new order is sweeping away the old.” They do not know, of course, that no one smashed those statues, least of all some supernatural power; these gods were never killed, because they were never born; they are trapped in halfformed stone for all eternity.
One day that tree will be full-grown, and the ten branches will be ladder to the bosom of God.
At least, that’s what they have told me.
* * *
This was a journey of the spirit. I cannot tell how much time passed, or if time passed at all. On the second day, the sound of my husband instructing my wayward son was quickly wearying, and I crawled out to the front once more to sit beside the charioteer who was to me the goddess. I smelled the sea as soon as I emerged. The sun was bright; the wind had a briny moisture to it.
I had stepped out onto the deck of a ship, but such a vessel as I had never seen on the Sea of Galilee. Where the horses had been, there were wave-crests like row after row of white-maned steeds. Beneath us, I could hear the drumbeat of a hortator, and I could he the rhythmic slap of the oars against the ocean. The prow of the ship was a many-breasted woman with blue skin; although she was made of wood, her eyes were living; I knew now that the vessel, like the horse-drawn cart, was an extension of the goddess’s body.
A servant brought me a tray of fruit. Like the musicians and the dancers in the oasis, this slave seemed both male and female.
There were pomegranates, figs, and quinces; grapes, dates, and apples. The servant kneeled before me, holding out the platter; I reached out to touch the fruit, and then I thought again.
The pomegranate is the fruit of the dead; the secret wisdom of the women has taught me that the leaves and the seeds of the pomegranate are what binds the souls of the dead to the world beneath. And I thought too of the quince, which some claimed was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. I wondered if the other fruits had darker meanings, too.
“Is this fruit forbidden?” I asked the servant.
She only said, “Nothing is forbidden, my lady, unless you yourself forbid it.”
At that moment, I saw King Balthasar emerge from below decks. He saw me and said to me, “Remember, Miriam, you are being a traveler in the realm of Maya now; nothing is real.”
I still did not feel I should eat the fruit.
“You’re going to see terrible things now,” he went on. “But remember … it’s illusion.”
Even as he spoke, I saw my son and husband in an animated conversation some distance away, leaning over the side of the ship. Halfway to the horizon, two whales were breaching the waves, the sun glancing off the slick skin. They were coupling. I had never seen whales in the throes of passion before; the one lay on her back, the other mounted her, and the pair swimming at top speed to sustain the stability of the position.…
And far away, against the horizon, there were jagged boulders, a blue-green mist, the vaguest outline of land.…
Out of nowhere, a storm unleashed itself. Rain pelted down. There was thunder and lightning, and the androgynous crew members were rushing about, scrambling to get below deck. I had no time to think. The ship heaved, I staggered, my stomach churned … I feel to the deck. Brine sluiced the planks. Salt flooded my nostrils. I was spluttering. Trying to grab hold of anything. I could see treasure chests floating into the sea … silks and jeweled goblets bobbing up and down and … the wet wind lashed at us. The ship righted itself, and I heard shouts of: “The Carpenter … he’s fallen overboard …”
The storm was already subsiding, harsh sunlight bursting through chinks in the cloud cover. The crew were climbing back up now, tying things down, staring at the ocean … and as I rushed to towards the stern I could see my husband in the water, furiously trying to swim toward a plank.…
And there was my son. “Don’t worry, Mother,” he said. “I’ll bring him back.” And he smiled at me, a smile of such utter calm that it chilled me. Because though the wind was dying, the waters were still turbulent, and the sailors still in panic over a tempest that had lasted but a moment.
How could Joshua bring him back? Joseph was being carried out further to sea. And the seamen were throwing down ropes, but no one wanted to leap in after him.
Except my son. He stripped off his Grecian chiton and his head covering, and leaped naked into the sea. I had never seen my son swim before. In Alexandria, he had stuck to the streets, not the sea. But even now, he did not swim.
He fell very slowly, as though riding the wind.
He landed on his feet on the waves.
And I thought, He will not suffer thy foot to be moved.…
With great deliberation, carefully placing one foot before the other, like a temple dancer on a tightrope, he moved towards his stepfather.
I heard others whispering, “He’s walking on water.”
But I could see, just below the surface, the dark, unmoving outline of leviathan. The sea water sparkled in the sun; his bright eyes shone against his olive complexion; he seemed as strong as fullgrown man as he pulled his stepfather from the ocean.
The crew were gathering now, and someone cast down a rope ladder; and it seemed that on the instant that Joshua and my husband alighted on the ladder, the monster of the deep sounded, and a moment later the pair of whales was to be seen afar off, and a strange music filled the air, keening and thrumming at the same time; it was, Balthasar assured me, a song the whales sang often, and always to the glory of God.
A few moments passed; Joseph looked at Joshua as a sailor threw a garment over his shoulders.
At length, my husband said, “Well, at least you’re dressed like a Jew now.”
“I’m trying to please you,” Joshua said.
Joseph said, “Then don’t walk on water; you’ll catch your death.”
“I didn’t walk on water,” Joshua said. But I knew that the others had all witnessed a miracle; only I had seen how the monster of the deep had interrupted his lovemaking so that my son would not dash his foot against the sea.
“And don’t argue with me anymore. There’s a time for debating, and a time for listening.”
“I’m listening.”
And I saw, then, that though neither of them could speak of it, there was a kind of love between the two of them. I did not think they would ever come to admit it. They would not even look at each other.
And now, almost tripping over the robe that was far too long for him, Joshua turned to me; wordlessly, still wet and shivering, he fell into my mother embrace; but even close to me he was wary, unyielding.
And suddenly we came upon those shoals that I had seen at the very edge of the horizon, and King Balthasar was urging us inside.
“I don’t need to go in,” Joshua said. “I’m not afraid.”
“Go in anyway,” said the king. “We’re about to be shipwrecked.”
The ship foundered on a massive rock, and I heard a groan as of splintering timber, but with a curiously human quality to it.…
* * *
At this point in my narrative, the man who was about to create a new religion on my son’s dead bones broke in. “You don’t have to go on,” Paul, Saul, whatever his name was, said to me. “I’ve heard enough. There’s nothing I really need in what you’re telling me.”
I smiled. “Ah, but there is,” I said. “It’s all there, every bit of pagan symbolism you need to make your religion palatable to the Gentiles.”
He paused then, because he knew I had seen through him. He wanted a story from me that he could spin into a perfect arc of godhead, with the bitter widow as golden Isis suckling the crucified rebel as shining Horus; me as the Great Mother ploughing the blood of my son and lover into the soil to bring forth the harvest; he wanted to ship me off to Ephesus to replace the hundred-breasted huntress. Which, in the end, came to pass.
Paul said, “I want something more powerful than reality … I want truth.”
The kind of distinction the Greeks love to make, and which quite staggers those of us who speak less dissembling tongues.
* * *
The beach we foundered on was India. Not the India of history, where Alexander the Great had stumbled upon the far boundary of the universe, and turned back from the edge to encounter only drunkenness and death; this was, perhaps, an India of the mind. Though Paul would no doubt draw many comparisons to Alexander; for Alexander, too, was a god’s son, a messiah of sorts, dead in his thirties.
From the impact of the ship against the rocks to the time we stepped onto the sand was mere moments. It seemed to me that the ship fell apart in two halves, and the halves dematerialized into the burning air, and there had never been a ship at all. Instead, there was a white elephant, caparisoned in cloth of gold; atop its back was a howdah cunningly carved of wood, with caryatid columns and a roof made from the images of many-headed demons.
The elephant knelt, and the king led the way, mountain by way of gilt steps that were wheeled up to the creature’s side by attendants.
Seated on the elephant’s neck was the woman in blue.
“Your journey will soon be over, Joshua,” the king said to my son, who, since his adventure with the sea, was ever more withdrawn, huddling in a corner of the howdah, hugging his knees and staring at the ground as it swayed beneath us. “Look, Miriam; do you see the castle?”
I saw only snowcapped mountains, impossibly tall, impossibly far.
“No, you don’t see it yet,” said the king. “You see only the Himavant, and high Kailasa, dwelling place of the gods. Open your mind, Miriam … let the illusions in.”
The elephant was climbing a steep path, pausing now and then to roll a fallen tree trunk out of its way. We traveled for what might have been days; time was a flexible thing in these countries past the known world’s edge.
The mountain still seemed impossibly far. We stopped at a waystation in a clearing. Sandalwood incense filled the air, and there was a temple in the same ornate style as the elephant’s howdah. Priests in white robes and turbans wandered haughtily about. There was a statue of a goddess with a hundred arms, wearing a necklace of skulls, her feet trampling on corpses.
“There’s your demon Ashtaroth,” Joseph said to me. “The mankilling she-beast. It seems that she rules here.”
I did not argue with him; I knew it would be useless. I gazed at the statue. I knew that the goddess had a thousand names; she was Persephone, queen of darkness; she was the mother of the spirits that visit men in the night and drain away their seed; she was Lilith; she was the goddess who had been the consort of the most high once, and who was now condemned to rule over dirt and shadows; in this country, at least, men acknowledged her power.
We resumed our journey at dawn. The road grew wilder. We passed a surging river lined with temples; men and women bathed in its waters, and the dead were burned in pyres there, their ashes cast onto the waters. We passed ascetics, naked old men covered with filth, some standing on one leg, some with their cheeks and torsos pierced with metal rods, all bone thin; we passed some sitting cross-legged under trees, their eyes closed, gazing as it were upon some inner vision; we saw men whirling themselves into frenzies, women dancing among monkeys; we saw men prostrating themselves before oxen, and everywhere the many-armed demons, towering over shrines, guarding palace gates, painted on walls; and always the lady in blue drove the white elephant forward, tapping its neck with a silver goad.
“This is a desolate place,” my husband said. “Abomination everywhere. Men who imitate women, men who worship beasts. I thought Alexandria was a second Sodom, but this is beyond imagination.”
Joshua was still huddled in the corner of the howdah, staring at emptiness.
“Look at what it’s done to our son,” Joseph said. “This journey is killing him, filling him with terrible ideas, destroying his soul.”
And I marveled, not only at what he said, but that this was the first time he had said our son; and I knew there was a kind of magic at work.
So I simply said, “We’ll be home soon.”
I think my husband would have embraced me if we were not in a small open chamber perched on a lumbering beast. I put my hand out to steady myself; he held onto it, and, perhaps, squeezed it; I was not sure. I thought: He does love me, underneath it all, though I’ve put him through so much. I wanted to put my arms around him, but I knew he would think it immodest of me.
We stopped again. This new encampment was a place shrouded in mist; moisture seeped into our lungs; scarred rocks emerged from the roiling fog, and here and there a shrine stood, its offerings mouldy and half devoured by wild animals. The mountains were still just as far away as before.
We took shelter in a cave. But it was nothing like the cave in which I held my newborn child. This cave was covered with murals depicting the exploits of strange gods. Gold leaf was peeling from wooden beams; the scent of incense was everywhere; and there were statues of a man, cross-legged, his hair aflame; whose eyes held a rare serenity. And then, in niches in the cave, there were live men too, anchorites I guessed, in the same cross-legged attitude. Their eyes were closed. Like many we had seen on the road here, they seemed to be gazing inward.
“Who are these men?” I asked the king.
“They believe that the world is an illusion,” he said. “They are trying to end that illusion. They are thinking that if they are perfectly still, they will touch the still center of the cosmos, and when they have become as nothing, they will be everything.”
There were bats and monkeys in the cave, too; the bats perched high up, sleeping, like black furry roof-tiles; the monkeys scurrying, peering, chattering, stealing the offerings to the gods.
Balthasar took his place upon a throne of rock, with incense braziers at his feet. Vassals brought food; other servants spread out pallets of straw for us in shadowed crannies of the cave. Joshua seemed at last to have become impatient. He wasn’t in a corner rocking himself back and forth now. He was pacing. Finally he asked the king about his father. “Who is my father, then? Why did he send you to me? Why is it taking so long to reach him?”
The king said only, “You will be reaching him, Joshua, when your soul will tell you you are willing to reach him.”
“Riddles! You’re as bad as Joseph. You told me there would be an orchard at the end of this journey. You told me my father would be waiting for me, and I would finally know who I am.”
“No riddles, my beautiful young prince. You do not know the answers because you do not want to know them.”
* * *
And in the night, with the moonlight streaming in through high fissures in the cavern’s roof, I could not sleep; and I saw that neither my son nor my husband were sleeping either. I lit an oil lamp and wandered listlessly; the cave was labyrinthine.
In the hollow where the king dozed on his capacious throne, the walls were painted from floor to ceiling. These were the gods and demons these people believed in; each one had many heads and arms. A great ape yawned the moon and the stars. A goddess dancing across the clouds wielded the lightning. And directly behind the throne, there was painted a golden door, and on either side of the door were depicted Greek letters — alpha on the left, omega on the right. It did not surprise me that there was Greek here; perhaps the murals had been painted in the days when Alexander the Great ruled all the world.
Next to the door was depicted a golden chariot, even in the light of my flickering oil lamp it seemed to shine of its own. Next to the chariot stood a god, his skin completely blue, holding a flute. His face was the essence of manliness, yet it held a feminine beauty as well. His eyes sparkled. I found myself staring at that face; for it was a face I seemed to recognize, though I could not imagine whence.
Presently I heard voices; it was Joseph and Joshua deep in conversation yet again; I could hear the stark music of the ancient tongue, and I knew that Joseph was making another attempt to teach my son the meaning of the Torah. Because I knew that my husband would find it unseemly, I ducked behind the throne, pressed myself against the stone, tried to will myself into invisibility.
